check wiki for the invention of the keyboard, there was no reason why it was invented that way, as long as ppl use it that way without problem, who care how they were arranged.
I have read about it on Wikipedia (see below). According to Wikipedia the QWERTY layout was designed to solve problems that the iPhone doesn’t have, such as jammed keys on a typewriter. Furthermore, even if a person typed with all of their fingers in home row on an iPhone, which nobody will, the layout was designed for slowness, biases typing to the left hand, etc.
Furthermore, I’m not convinced that people do use such a layout on an iPhone, or any other phone, without problems, as you suggest. If you have any evidence that they do I’d be very curious to see it. In any case, whether a better layout should be adopted should not depend on whether people have problems with the existing one. If the benefits of having a newer one out way the negatives of keeping the old one, we should have a new one, one should be developed.
I care about how they’re arranged. There is simply no reason, given multi-touch technology, that we should continue with an archaic standard. It would seem that the ability to have different keyboards for different situations may benefit people with disabilities, people with different hand sizes, people who speak and write in different languages, and people who’ve already, or will, develop some sort of physiological strain from using QWERTY.
From Wikipedia:
The QWERTY keyboard layout was devised in the 1860s by the creator of the first modern typewriter, Christopher Sholes, a newspaper editor who lived in Milwaukee. Originally, the characters on the typewriters he invented were arranged alphabetically, set on the end of a metal bar which struck the paper when its key was pressed. However, once an operator had learned to type at speed, the bars attached to letters that lay close together on the keyboard became entangled with one another, forcing the typist to manually unstick the typebars, and also frequently blotting the document[1]. Sholes solved the jamming problem not by forcing typists to slow down, but by separating common sequences of letters in English[2]. Pairs of keys that are frequently struck in succession were placed as far from each other as possible, so that the hammers that were likely to be used in quick succession were less likely to interfere with each other. [citation needed]
The home row (ASDFGHJKL) of the QWERTY layout is thought to be a remnant of the old alphabetical layout that QWERTY replaced. QWERTY also attempted to alternate keys between hands, allowing one hand to move into position while the other hand strikes a key. This sped up both the original double-handed hunt-and-peck technique and the later touch typing technique; however, single-handed words such as stewardesses, lollipop and monopoly show flaws in the alternation.
An unfortunate consequence of the layout, for right-handed typists, is that many more words can be spelled using only the left hand. In fact, thousands of English words can be spelled using only the left hand, while only a couple of hundred words can be typed using only the right hand.